The devastation in Mayotte after the devastating cyclone is unspeakable, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has announced that he will visit the site of the tragedy in the French archipelago.
CNN reported that fears now include, although early estimates are emerging, thousands more dead as the devastating Cyclone Shido swept through Mayotte on Saturday, causing devastation where one resident lived like a nuclear explosion.
“The situation is devastating, revealing,” Bruno Garcia, owner of Hotel Caribou in Mamoudzou – the capital of Mayotte – told BFM TV.
“It’s like an atomic bomb fell on Mayotte”
“We lost everything. The hotel is completely destroyed,” said Garcia, adding: “There is nothing left. It’s like an atomic bomb dropped on Mayotte.”
Mayotte is located in the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Africa, west of Madagascar. It consists of two main islands and its area is about twice that of Washington. Cyclone Shinto, a Category 4 storm, crossed the southwestern Indian Ocean over the weekend, hitting northern Madagascar before quickly intensifying and hitting Mayotte with winds of more than 220 kilometers per hour, according to the weather service of French. It was the strongest storm to hit the islands in more than 90 years, Meteo-France said.
‘Shindo’ then continued towards northern Mozambique, where it continued to cause damage, although the storm has now weakened.
The cyclone – the worst to hit an estimated 300,000 people in at least 90 years – leveled neighbourhoods, knocked out power grids, destroyed hospitals and schools and damaged the airport’s control tower. “Honestly, what we are experiencing is a tragedy, it feels like you are after a nuclear war… I saw a whole neighborhood gone,” Mohamed Ishmael, a resident of Mamoudzou, told Reuters.
At least 14 people have been confirmed dead by France’s health minister, but the actual death toll is expected to be much higher, with local officials predicting the death toll could be in the hundreds or even thousands, reported the Associated Press.
“I think there are a few hundred dead, maybe a thousand”
“I think a few hundred are dead, maybe close to a thousand. Even thousands … because of the violence of this phenomenon,” said the prefect of Mayotte François-Xavier Bieuville to the Mayotte TV station la 1ère.
French President Emmanuel Macron told X late Monday that he plans to travel to Mayotte “in the coming days to support our fellow citizens, civil servants and the emergency services that have been mobilized.” He also said he would declare a period of national mourning.
Earlier on Monday afternoon, Acting Interior Minister Bruno Retailo said it was impossible to estimate the death toll, admitting that “it is clear that the island is completely destroyed”.
French military aerial photographs showed villages reduced to rubble. Many of the roughly 100,000 undocumented migrants living in Mayotte are in these neighborhoods, according to the French interior ministry. Mayotte, which is about 8,000 km away. from Paris, it is the poorest point in the European Union. In recent years, thousands of people from Comoros and Madagascar have come to Mayotte in search of better economic conditions and access to the French welfare system.
“Everything is level”
The extent of damage from the storm, which destroyed roads and communication networks, and the number of undocumented migrants living in informal housing hampered search and rescue efforts and made it difficult to ascertain the true toll of the death toll. About two-thirds of the island is currently inaccessible, Estelle Youssouffa, MP for Mayotte’s first constituency, told BMF TV. “We must not confuse villages cut off from communication (…) with slums, where there is little chance of survivors. Everything is balanced,” he said.
Antoine Piacenza, who works at a high school in Mamoudzou, told BFM TV that many of his undocumented students chose not to leave before the storm for fear of being arrested by the police. In recent years, France has flooded the island with thousands of police officers tasked with deporting undocumented migrants and breaking up their settlements, CNN reports.
Desperate family members took to social media for news of their loved ones after the storm. On Monday morning Mayotte was almost completely offline for more than 36 hours, according to the NetBlocks website.
“We have no electricity, we have no water, we have been in the dark for three days. It was three days and we didn’t see any rescuers,” Mayotte resident Fahar told BFM TV.
Retalio said France has mobilized two naval ships and hopes more flights will be able to land soon, noting that flights still cannot land at night since the cyclone hit bad airport.
Meanwhile, hundreds of rescuers, firefighters and police have been dispatched to the area from France and Reunion, the Associated Press reported.
